A year into running Hearthlight Inn, Edric Vane has dry rooms, a full ledger, and a household that finally trusts the roof won't come down around them. He also has absolutely no idea what he's doing around horses, which is less of a problem until the inn's whole supply chain starts running through someone else's stable yard.

That someone is Vestele — blunt enough to flatten a room, patient enough to gentle any horse alive, and four years into protecting a yard she built herself after a business partner gutted it out from under her. She didn't ask for help and she isn't going to thank anyone for it. But her lease just got squeezed by a buyer with unlimited patience and a fourteen-day deadline, and if her yard goes under, so does the trade route Hearthlight spent all of last year fighting to secure. She doesn't trust easy — not the buyer's terms, and not the man who keeps turning up at her gate with bread, bad horse jokes, and no intention of leaving.

Edric shows up anyway — uninvited, the same way he showed up at Hearthlight's own door a year ago. Thalia and Isabel aren't far behind him. Vestele calls it a trade, not a rescue, and insists on terms. Nobody argues the wording. They just start pulling the paperwork.

The buyer has a name now: Tidemark. Polite, reasonable, impossible to rattle — and apparently in no hurry at all, because patience, given enough time, tends to win. Whiteport's quietest company has been testing the town's edges one yard, one lease, one tired owner at a time, and Hearthlight just put its own name on the list.

In this book

• A blunt, horse-gentle stablemaster who trusts nothing until she's checked it herself
• A hero back to being the household's novice again, horses this time
• A villain whose weapon is patience, not force
• A found family proving a door only has to open a little wider to hold one more